The Final Boss: AI + Arm

This is the most advanced project on R2BOT. If you've worked through the track from line follower to ROS2, you're ready. If you're jumping straight here — respect, but it'll be steep.

Here's what you're building: a camera above a conveyor belt spots objects, classifies them in real time, calculates their 3D position, and commands a 4-DOF robotic arm to pick them up and drop them into the correct bin. Repeat. Indefinitely. Without a human.

This is not a demo concept. Amazon's Sparrow robot does exactly this — it's in their fulfilment centres right now, sorting individual items from shelves. FANUC uses the same computer vision + arm combination for quality control on automotive production lines. The technology you're learning is running at industrial scale.

The stack:

• YOLOv8 — real-time neural network object detection
• Jetson Nano — NVIDIA GPU-on-a-board for inference at the edge
• cv2.solvePnP() — coordinate transformation from camera pixels to arm world coordinates
• 4-DOF arm — inverse kinematics to reach any point in 3D space

Let's break each layer apart.